He didn’t take revenge. That would have been obvious. The fantasy version where the past is exposed under academic lighting. He imagined those versions. Anyone would. Jill sat in the audience, unmistakable. Same posture. Same alertness, like surveillance disguised as engagement. Years earlier, she turned seminars into battlegrounds, enthusiasm into a kind of theater that left others smaller. He noticed her right away. Then the defense began. The committee asked their questions. Thoughtful, technical, sometimes wandering. He answered and stayed with the material. No rush.

At one point, she raised a hand. Of course she did. The room shifted, he felt it. The old pattern again. The question was framed politely but beneath was the familiar structure. A tightening. An invitation to stumble. And then he recognized the question no longer had the same power. Because he was elsewhere. The answer stayed with the work. He acknowledged the point where it made sense, declined the part that didn’t, and moved on.

JIll did not follow up. At the end, when the committee asked them to step outside, he stood in the hallway and realized something quietly. The person who had once made his life difficult had become irrelevant to the outcome. The defense was not a stage for settling scores. It was a test of whether he could hold his own thinking under pressure. When he was called back in and told he had passed, he concluded something like amusement. If there had been a revenge, it was this. That the old dynamics had no traction. That the person who once occupied so much mental space was now just another audience member asking a question. He shook hands. Thanked the committee. Gathered his notes. On the way out, he nodded to Jill. Not warmly. Not coldly. Just enough to register they were both there, and whatever had once been between them no longer required performance. Some songs end strangely.